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`She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.' The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859. A dark fantasy woven from contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology and experiments in revification it is Eliot's anatomy of her own moral philsophy - the ideal of imaginative sympathy or the ability to see into others' minds and emotions. Narrated by an egoccentric, morbid young clairvoyant man whose fascination for Bertha Grant lies partly in her obliquity, the story also explores fiction's ability to offer insight into the self, as well as being a remarkable portrait of a misdeveloped artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The Lifted Veil is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works. Published as a companion piece to The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob is by contrast Eliot's literary homage to Thackeray, a satirical modern fable that draws telling parallels between eating and reading. Yet both stories reveal Eliot's deep engagement with the question of whether there are 'necessary truths' independent of our perception of them and the boundaries of art and the self. Helen Small's introduction casts new light on works which fully deserve to be read alongside Eliot's novels.
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The time of my end approaches. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
The time of my end approaches. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Lifted Veil is one of the darkest and bleakest pieces of literature I have ever read but, for all its unremitting gloom, it is devestatingly compelling. Eliot chooses a first-person narrator for her story, a morose and hypersensitive individual named Latimer, who begins to be afflicted with the unwanted ability to 'hear' the interior thoughts and emotions of those around him. The barrier between his own thoughts and those of his acquaintances begins to crumble and break down; his mind becomes overwhelmed with the banal interior monologues of dreary friends as their thoughts bleed through into his own consciousness. Latimer retreats into a state of near emotional non-engagement, only able to sympathise with people whose emotional despair matches his own, and with the enigmatic and beautiful Bertha, the one person whose thoughts remain veiled and hidden from him. After Latimer's brother Alfred dies in an accident Bertha, previously engaged to Alfred, drifts towards the afflicted and love-struck narrator. And then, with brutal, poisonous potency, the thoughts in her mind begin to break through into Latimer's consciousness.....
It's all top-drawer Gothic horror, and completely at odds with Eliot's sober reputation as a firm exponent of realism, but she does have a serious purpose in telling the tale. By portraying such an extreme situation, and someone lost in such an extreme form of emotional hell, Eliot was able to examine the far reaches of sympathetic engagement. It's dark - and I suspect Eliot must have been inhabiting a failry bleak emotional landscape in order to be able to pen such a horrific tale - but it is amazingly imaginitive and perceptive.
The other tale in the volume, Brother Jacob, is a much more light-hearted tale - a reflection on the nature of art and lying. It's worth reading - it is extremely well done - but it's The Lifted Veil, with its narrator drifting through a nightmarish landscape of affliction and self-pity, which lingers (appropriately enough) in he mind.
Read it and, by turns, admire and weep. And if you've ever wished you could really know what someone else was thinking, rather than having to interpret their inner thoughts through gestures and the imperfect, and easily veiled, medium of language, then don't. Other people's minds .... really, it's best not to know .....
It's all top-drawer Gothic horror, and completely at odds with Eliot's sober reputation as a firm exponent of realism, but she does have a serious purpose in telling the tale. By portraying such an extreme situation, and someone lost in such an extreme form of emotional hell, Eliot was able to examine the far reaches of sympathetic engagement. It's dark - and I suspect Eliot must have been inhabiting a failry bleak emotional landscape in order to be able to pen such a horrific tale - but it is amazingly imaginitive and perceptive.
The other tale in the volume, Brother Jacob, is a much more light-hearted tale - a reflection on the nature of art and lying. It's worth reading - it is extremely well done - but it's The Lifted Veil, with its narrator drifting through a nightmarish landscape of affliction and self-pity, which lingers (appropriately enough) in he mind.
Read it and, by turns, admire and weep. And if you've ever wished you could really know what someone else was thinking, rather than having to interpret their inner thoughts through gestures and the imperfect, and easily veiled, medium of language, then don't. Other people's minds .... really, it's best not to know .....
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